With the coming of the information era, relying on a computer network makes reliability of operating the computer network significantly important, and a higher requirement is imposed on network management. According to a definition of an open system interconnection (OSI), there are mainly five functional domains for network management: fault management, configuration management, performance management, security management, and accounting management. Among the five functional domains, configuration management is a basis, and main functions of configuration management include discovering a network topology structure, and monitoring and managing a configuration status of a network device. All other functions are based on the network topology structure. Network topology discovery is performed for an end-to-end connection relationship in a network, and a main objective is to obtain and maintain existence information of network nodes and connection relationship information of the network nodes, and draw a topology diagram of the entire network based on the existence information and the connection relationship information.
As a specific form of a network topology, an application topology (Application Topology) in an IT system is a network communication relationship between virtual machines, and network communication between the virtual machines is generated based on applications run by the virtual machines. More specifically, the application topology is a deployment relationship of application components (such as a program, a service, a component, and a virtual machine running the application) in hosts (such as servers) in the IT system and an interaction relationship (such as a service request and response) between the deployed application components.
Existing application topology discovery is active detection discovery. Active detection is an action of studying an application structure and an application user by sending a related detection data packet to a network target, and observing, recording and returning a result. Because a large amount of data needs to be sent to a network, load in the network is increased, and accuracy of topology discovery is low.